Introduction

When you submit your manuscript to a journal, your submission embodies all the hope and effort that went into your research. Years of painstaking work are often represented in just a few thousand words.

Inevitably, what happens to your submission next depends on the way you present that work as well as the quality of your research and the uniqueness of your academic contribution. That’s daunting for everyone. However, it’s especially daunting if you’re a multilingual scholar (an author working in English as your second or third language). Multilingual scholars have to do more work just to deliver equal outputs (Amano et al.). And despite journal editors’ best efforts to judge purely on academic contribution and not on language quality, the stats suggest that it’s not that simple.

Writing quality is a hidden barrier to publication

It turns out that when it comes to publication, it’s not just what you write, but the way you write. Multilingual authors suffer rejection rates that are more than double that of people who grew up speaking English (Amano et al.).

To see why that happens, it’s important to understand what editors and peer reviewers see and what they are being asked to do.

They see your words (and just your words). From those words, they must determine if your research is worthy of publication in the journal you chose to submit it to. If you’ve skipped some commas, it’s not going to make a big difference. But if your writing slows editors down as they try to understand exactly what you mean to convey then it creates a friction.

It helps to see things from the perspective of the editor. They have a choice to make. Do they:

• Make amendments themselves? It isn’t the job of the journal editor to fix English.

• Ask for revisions and an English language edit? That can be a complex thing to ask for.

• Reject the article completely? If they already have a lot of good articles, that makes the problem go away.  

It isn’t fair. But with that choice in mind, does it really come as a surprise that a higher proportion of articles by multilingual authors are rejected.

The best solution has always been to hire an editor to help. Academic editors can offer specialized assistance in your subject area. However, the cost of undertaking an edit is significant. There are over six thousand academic articles published every day (Zul Musa, Publishing State). Only a small percentage of those have a full academic edit first.

Where AI makes a difference (and where it doesn’t)

AI can’t write the articles for authors at the academic level. The output is only “superficially accurate” (Sebastian et al.). Even if problems with AI hallucinations were solved, and journals stopped requiring declarations, the reality is that the writing quality isn’t good enough. Instead of an author’s voice, the writing is generic noise.

However, there is another way to use AI in the production of articles. That’s at the editing stage rather than the writing stage.

For multilingual scholars, writing an article at the academic level in English so fluent that it sounds like someone who grew up with the language is a challenge. However, checking through a list of possible corrections is far easier. That’s where AI can truly help multilingual authors.

Improved fluency, trimming word counts, polishing grammar, and more

Draftsmith is designed to help with all of the key tasks that scholars may want to apply to their manuscripts. It can:

• Check fluency to help text sound as if it is written by someone who grew up with English as their first language.

• Trim word counts in order to reduce the size of the text to fit within publication limits without losing meaning.

• Simplify text to make it easier for journal editors, peer reviewers, and readers to engage with your writing.

• Conduct basic editing checks to fix typos, grammar, and more.

Draftsmith works at the sentence level in Microsoft Word. So it can guide you through your text line by line to ensure that the author’s voice is preserved at every stage. Draftsmith can’t do everything that a human editor would. However, it can quickly help you improve your text to increase your chance of acceptance at submission.

Affordable for everyone

A human editor is still the ideal solution for manuscripts. But only a small proportion of scholars can take on that cost. Draftsmith, on the other hand, costs just $18 USD for one month (enough time to edit an article). It even has a seven-day free trial of two thousand words per day. So if your article is under ten thousand words, you can edit the entire manuscript in a week for free.

Start a free trial of Draftsmith today.